Victor Hopkins (cyclist)

Victor Morice Hopkins ( born July 19, 1904 in Cedar Rapids, † December 8, 1969 in Nutley ) was an American cyclist.

Sports career

1921, at the age of 17, Victor Hopkins presented a new national record over five miles on. In 1924 he took part in the Olympic Games in Paris, for which he had qualified at several races in Paterson. There he was able to travel only with the financial support of patrons. In the road race, he finished 58th after he had promising located in third place and had demolished the bike in a fall. In the team competition, he finished together with Gustav Henschel, Ignatius Gronkowski and John Boulicault twelfth place.

After the Olympics, Hopkins was taken from the Cycling Manager John Chapman under contract and denied in the following years mainly six days and pacemaker race, which he won around 70. In 1926 he was U.S. champion stayer. His nickname Flicker he got, because he used to say because of the sparks from the exhaust of the pacemaker machine: " Let her flicker ". Due to a fourfold broken collarbone from a fall he could not defend his title in 1927. In 1929, he wanted to end his cycling career, but lost during the global economic crisis of 1929 his savings and was forced to continue. In 1934 he retired from active cycling after he was a few years down also race in Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland.

Private

Hopkins was the child of a single circus artist who freed him up for adoption at the age of one year. His adoptive parents died before he was nine years old, and he grew up in an orphanage in Davenport on the Iowa Soldiers ' Orphans ' Home (now The Annie Wittenmyer Home). Later he worked as a paperboy and used for his work a bicycle. The professional racing driver and frame builder Worth had established centers of the Davenport Cycling Club, discovered him for cycling. Hopkins later drove in races wheels of centers.

The early 1930s, Victor Hopkins friends with the German Cyclists Mathias angel. When he wanted to leave later because of his Jewish wife Germany, Hopkins helped him to organize the departure. Angel settled in Nutley, where Hopkins now lived and worked as a correctional officer in prison.

Honors

2005 was included Victor Hopkins in the Iowa Bicycle Racing Association Hall of Fame, 2006 in the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame and in 2009 into the Nutley Hall of Fame.